Sunday, May 31, 2009

Not everyone is directly affected by the latest injustices or is a victim of a crime but it is impossible not to be touched in some way by the absurdities and atrocities we see all around us everyday. Who is not made sad just hearing of these things?

Unless a person is so involved in their private little pursuit of happiness and is too busy to even hear of what is taking place just outside of their own sphere they cannot escape the feeling that something has gone awry in America, the world.

This week's news is but a cross section of last weeks, last months or last years news. This week we heard of a judge in Oklahoma who forced a five year old to testify in court against her rapist. After ducking under courtroom benches and chairs to avoid even looking at her rapist the defendant is then given a paltry one year sentence for the rape of the child.

Next is the story of two thugs standing outside of a polling booth in the 2008 elections intimidating voters before they enter to vote. That being hard enough to believe, now comes the report that Attorney General Eric Holder has decided not to prosecute the thugs even after a video with full audio has been made available of the incident. Is this Venezuela, Communist China or Cuba, no it is right here in America.

The third offering comes when we discover that the books of the activist group Acorn will not be made public to anyone including the media, the Justice Department or the IRS. Any average Joe with a salary of a meager 25K can be dragged into IRS hell in a heartbeat for an audit but Acorn gets a pass. Any church Catholic or protestant has to produce an accounting of every penny spent under their 501-C exemption but Acorn can spread untold millions around without a question. This double standard puts Martha Stewart in a class with Mother Theresa and Makes Bernard Madoff look like a fun loving swashbuckling pirate who just robbed the rich for the fun of it.

We can just throw in the nomination of a person to the Supreme Court who will keep us all on the edge of our seats and herself on the edge of credulity trying to explain just how she is sure a Latina woman will make a better justice than an ordinary white American male. (Her words not mine) Let's not forget the visit of Israel's Prime Minister who still doesn't like the land for loyalty deal he is being offered by the administration in this week's news a la carte.

Perhaps the cherry on top of this absurd sundae of bittersweet confections would have to be North Korea's firing of a test missile. The only thing we see with more speed and less range than the North Korean missile would be the administrations vociferous albeit innocuous response to it. Maybe we can woo Kim Jong-Il with Barry Gibb's "Its only words, but words are all I have, to take your heart away."

The end of almost anything is often the beginning of something else. It's the old "if one door closes, another one is going to open" adage that is at work here in America. Unfortunately seeing the end of America as we know it can only mean the beginning of one thing. Some call it socialism; some call it the new age of tolerance and diversity. By any other name it is still a sad time. The election slogan 'yes we can' is quickly transforming into 'yes you will' one news story at a time.

Yes you will be more shocked by the news day by day; yes you will see America's nobility, dignity and moral character eroding more day by day. And you will be made more sorrowful day by day at the hearing of these incidents unless you live in a cocoon.

In a passage of the Bible often referred to as the 'Olivet Discourse" (Mt 24) Jesus Christ was asked the question, "when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?" (Mt 24:3b) After a detailed description that included famines, earthquakes, wars and rumors of wars Christ declared a new beginning. No, not the beginning of the Millennial Kingdom where the lamb lies down with the lion but the beginning of a time of sorrows that precedes his imminent return. (Mt 24:8)

What American is not made sorrowful by the daily reports of judicial quackery, legislative chicanery, and social and moral decline? So what keeps us from a making a collective response to right all the wrongs? What Christ said about the rise of sorrows is appendaged with the reasons that we are prone to tolerate them.

In its final stages powerful leadership will be needed to hold together a disintegrating society along with unwanted political force but in the interim it is pretty much nothing at all that serves as the great distracter of the rank and file. Christ said it would take no more than the everyday business of eating, drinking, marriage and daily routine to keep the gloom away. (Mt 24:38, 39) In laymen's terms, the business of everyday life is all that's needed to give your self the business.

It is said that the ancient philosopher Diogenes went about in broad daylight with a lit lantern looking for an honest man." In America it may be said that we are going about with a burned out lamp and not looking for anything in particular except what pertains to our own personal world. When age, catastrophe, change or self reflection finally enters our personal realm we might then be touched by the "sorrows" that Christ spoke of, but even that is not a bad thing.

A little healthy sorrow might spur us to act; it could be the re-lighting of our lamps. You remember like the one in Lady Liberty's hand that symbolizes the truth and the search for justice and equity, that lamp that symbolizes the original call to a "change we can believe in."

Friday, May 29, 2009

Tuesday, October 9, 2007 started as a nice day in New York City. A lovely early fall day, with the temperature still a balmy 80° at 2:00 in the morning. By evening, though, the temperature had dropped twenty degrees, the clouds had rolled in, there was thunder and rain.

As with the weather, there were some hints of trouble here and there on Wall Street. But all in all, things could not have seemed better. Little did we know, the stormy end of 10/9/07 signaled a very large bubble that had just popped.

That was the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit its historic peak. From there, it was all downhill - slowly but steadily at first, and then violently after last August - until the Dow bottomed (for now) on March 9 of this year. Over that span, the index lost 54% of its value.

It's been a crushing blow to just about everyone. But it's already being referred to as the crash. As if the unpleasantness were now all behind us. More likely, in the future it will be seen as, simply, the first crash.

Don't believe it? In a moment you will, when you read about the scariest graph of the year.

But let's quickly recall what's already happened. During the late, great housing boom, interest rates were at microscopic levels, while bankers were encouraged to grant home loans on little more than a wink and a nudge. In order to inflate their balance sheets, those bankers resorted to all sorts of gimmicky, adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs), whose common feature was an interest rate that would eventually reset. That is, it would balloon somewhere down the road. And those most likely to come quickly to grief were the riskiest borrowers, who held loans known as "subprime."

"But not to worry," borrowers were told. "Betting on ever-rising home prices is the safest wager in the whole wide world. If you have problems with cash flow when the ARM resets, your house will be worth a lot more, so you can simply sell it and walk away with a nice chunk of change in your pocket." Uh-huh.

The bankers themselves were a little more concerned about the deterioration of their portfolios. They took out insurance in the form of credit default swaps (CDSs). These were a brand-new invention in world financial history, allowing mortgages to be sold and resold until they were leveraged 20 times over. They became the shakiest part of a huge global derivatives market, with a nominal value in the tens of trillions of dollars.

For a while, this Ponzi scheme even worked. But then, as they had to, the ARMs began resetting, and there were defaults. Then more of them. Because at the same time, the housing market was cooling off and the economy was stalling out. More and more people were trapped in a situation where they owed more on their home than they could sell it for. Many simply mailed their keys to the bank and moved on.

All of this wreaked havoc in the derivatives market. Sellers of these exotic packages could no longer establish what they were worth. Buyers couldn't determine a fair price and so stopped buying. As the ripples spread through the world financial system, trust disappeared and liquidity dried up.

Now consider that the base cause for all that dislocation was the subprime sector. And how big is that? Not very. Subprime mortgages account for only about 15% of all home loans. Their influence has been way out of proportion to their numbers, because of derivatives. Here's the good news: the subprime meltdown has about run its course. These loans were resetting en masse in 2007 and the first eight months of '08. Now they're pretty much done.

And the bad news? No one in the mainstream media seems to be asking what should be a pretty obvious question: What about loans other than subprime? Truth is, the banks didn't just trick up their subprime loans. ARMs were the order of the day - across the board.

You see from the beginning of 2007 through September of 2008, subprime loans were resetting like crazy. Those are the ones people were walking away from, sending a shockwave from defaults and foreclosures smack into the middle of the economy. Now they're gone.

The ARM market got very quiet between December 2008 and March 2009, hitting a low that won't be seen again until November of 2011. Small wonder a few "green shoots" have poked their heads above ground. But in April, resets began to increase and will reach an intermediate peak in June. After that, they tail off a little, going basically flat for the next ten months.

It's not until May of 2010 that the next wave really hits. From there to October of 2011, the resets will be coming fast and furious. That's 18 months of further turmoil in the housing market, and the beginning is still nearly a year away! (Although the months in between are likely to be no picnic, either.)

While it isn't subprime ARMs that are resetting this time, neither are they prime loans. Those eligible for prime loans wisely tended to stay away from ARMs in the first place, as indicated by the relatively small space they take up on each bar.

No, the next to go are Alt-A's , Option ARMs and Unsecuritized ARMs. Alt-As are loans to the folks who are a small step up from subprime. Unsecuritized loans are a 50-50 proposition; either the borrowers were good enough that they weren't thrown into the CDS pool, or they were so risky no one would insure them.

Those two are bad enough. But Option ARMs are the real black sheep, loans with choices on how large a payment the borrower will make. The options include interest-only or, worse, a minimum payment that is less than interest-only, leading to "negative amortization" - a loan balance that continually gets bigger, not smaller. Imagine what happens with those when the piper calls.

Once the carnage begins, will it be as bad as the subprime crisis? That's the $64K question. Perhaps not. For one thing, subprime loans were a much larger chunk of the market when they started going south. For another, there's been a lot of refinancing as interest rates dropped; that should help ease the default rate. And the government has massively intervened, with measures designed to prop up those who would otherwise lose their homes.

On the other hand, we're in a severe recession, which wasn't the case when the subprime crisis started. More people will be unable to meet payments. And the housing market has continued to decline, pressuring both marginal homeowners and banks that can't sell foreclosed properties.

Is the stock market's next 10/9/07 on the way? Yes. Which day will it be? That's unknowable. It could be in a week, or not for another year.

But make no mistake about it, the second crash is coming. It can't be prevented, no matter what desperate measures Obama and his hapless financial advisors come up with. All we can hope for is that, with a little luck, it won't be as severe as the first one. But it will last longer. We aren't even in the middle of the woods yet, much less on the way out.

05/28/09 Baltimore, Maryland The government has released Treasury documents surrounding Oct. 13, 2008 — the day the U.S. government launched TARP. After a long battle between Judicial Watch and the Obama administration, the government has finally coughed up some details of the infamous meeting between the Treasury and the heads of the U.S.’ biggest and most troubled banks. Oh, my… take a seat for this.

First and most interestingly, the documents show that Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson gave the nine bailed-out banks NO CHOICE but to accept the government’s cash-for-equity deal. “Your firms need to agree,” his talking points read. “If a capital infusion is not appealing, you should be aware that your regulator will require it in any circumstance.”

What’s more, there’s all kinds of ridiculous Gestapo-style secrecy surrounding the meeting. Treasury officials asked for Secret Service assistance to keep the press in the dark. The White House launched a PR campaign to crush public fears of bank nationalization. And the coup de grace: In all the released documents, all remarks by current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner are either censored or missing. After all, they have to protect their golden boy.

“How is it,” asks our executive publisher, Addison Wiggin, unable to resist, “that the Treasury secretary, chairman of the Fed and their minions have risen to the level of national security that the military has traditionally claimed?”

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Bilderberg boys are a bunch of grumpy old men but remain fiercely dedicated to usurping sovereignty in the United States and throughout the world. Patriots can celebrate their setbacks but never let up: Bilderberg still threatens the sovereignty of all nations while fighting for world government.

Major goals remain exploiting the global recession and an imaginary “swine flu pandemic” to establish global departments of treasury and health under the United Nations. But at the May 14-17 meeting in Vouliagmeni, Greece, near Athens, Bilderberg took a keen interest in persuading the United States to surrender sovereignty to the International Criminal Court, or ICC.

Bilderberg is also setting up a “summit” in Israel June 8-11 so “the world’s leading regulatory experts” can “address the current economic situation in one forum,” said Zohar Goshen, chairman of a subgroup of the International Association of Securities Commissions (IOSCO). Mary Shapiro, chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, will represent this country.

Bilderberg found President Obama a Willing Wilkie at its June, 2008 meeting in Chantilly, Va. near Washington. They were reassured when he chose their boy, Harold Koh, a strong advocate of the U.S. accepting the ICC, as the State Department’s top lawyer.

In the Penn State Law Review, Koh wrote sneeringly of “nationalists” who oppose surrendering sovereignty to international institutions, including the ICC. He praised the “transnationalist faction” on the Supreme Court and the wisdom of the jurists for their rejection of the “nationalist faction.”

“Generally speaking, the transnationalists tend to emphasize the interdependence between the United States and the rest of the world, while the nationalists tend instead to focus more on preserving American autonomy,” Koh wrote. “The transnationalists believe in and promote the blending of international and domestic law, while nationalists continue to maintain a rigid separation of domestic from foreign law.”

The “transnationalists view domestic courts as having a critical role to play in domesticating international law into U.S. law, while nationalists argue instead that only the political branches can internalize international law,”

Koh wrote. “Transnationalists believe that U.S. courts could and should use their interpretive powers to promote the development of a global legal system, while the nationalists tend to claim that U.S. courts should limit their attention to the development of a national system.”

Five Supreme Court justices have said, to Koh’s delight, that U.S. courts should take into consideration the rulings of foreign courts in deciding domestic cases. They are: John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

In a Bilderberg warm up, the Washington-based American Society of International Law called on the U.S to embrace the ICC. These luminariesincluded former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, former Rep. Mickey Edwards and a roster of educated fools.

Carl Bildt, Sweden’s minister for foreign affairs, made a pitch for two other major Bilderberg goals: creating a global Department of Treasury and Department of Health, with all nations surrendering sovereignty over these issues to the UN. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is to become the Treasury Department and the World Health Organization the World Health Department. But Bildt seized on an old Bilderberg issue, global warming, to make the case for WHO. Bilderberg propaganda over a “swine flu pandemic” has fallen victim to facts: On average, 300,000 Americans develop flu each year and 30,000 die. Only a few have died or even been seriously afflicted by “swine flu.”

The world economic meltdown is a “once-in-a-generation crisis while global warming is a “once-in-a-millennium challenge,” Bildt told Bilderberg. Sources inside Bilderberg said Bildt’s speech mirrored an address he gave to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Carnegie’s president, Jessica Mathews, is a long-time Bilderberg participant.

“We are at a critical time,” Bildt told Bilderberg. “The order of magnitude [of world crises] are more challenging than we are used to. The world economic recession has already reversed strong annual growth rates in many developing [poor] nations and in some parts of Europe and has the potential to bring down governments. . . . ”

“When we hit bottom, we can’t be sure where we’ll bounce back up,” Bildt said. “This is an urgent economic crisis unlike anything we have dealt with in living memory.” However, he called for a bounce-back within years, not a decade-long recession as some called for in efforts to exploit human misery.

Bildt then turned to selling global warming as the gateway to a World Health Department under the UN. Bilderberg boys, including David Rockefeller and others who inherited great wealth as the sons of smokestack industrialists, grabbed global warming as an issue more than a decade as a means of generating huge profits with investments to “save the planet.” Now, global warming has a new role.

“We know we need to take action,” Bildt said of global warming. “The global crisis is now,” he said. “The necessity to take action on climate change is now.” His calls for “global action” on these supposed “crises” were thinly disguised calls for UN control.

Bildt called for world (UN) solutions to virtually all problems. He cited the European Union as “model of integration, saying, “the EU is emerging as a global actor.” He advocates expanding NAFTA throughout the Western Hemisphere to create an “American Union.”

The International Monetary Fund sent a report to Bilderberg advocating its rise to the role of World Treasury Department. “Further actions by policymakers, particularly in the financial sector, are needed to restore market trust and confidence,” said Marek Belka, director of the IMF’s European department and former prime minister of Poland.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner enthusiastically endorsed the plan for a World Treasury Department, although he received no assurance that he would become its leader. He expressed “hope” that American and European leaders could “work together” to achieve such a “global solution” to the world economic meltdown.

The IMF’s planned new role as a world Treasury Department should be welcome news to the “little guy,” Geithner told Bilderberg. “The damage has been unfair and indiscriminant,” he said. “Ordinary Americans, small business owners and community banks who did the right thing and played by the rules are suffering from the actions of those who took on too much risk.”

But, even with a World Treasury Department, problems will not disappear overnight, Geithner warned. “These are all welcoming signs, but the process of financial recovery and repair is going to take time,” he said, lending his weight to a relative short-term recession as opposed to those who backed a long-term recovery. The people of Europe and America will have suffered enough to embrace a World Treasury Department, he said.

“Our hope is that we can work with Europe on a global framework, a global infrastructure which has appropriate global oversight,” Geithner said. “We can’t allow institutions to cherry-pick among competing regulators and ship risk to where it faces the lowest standards and weakest constraints.”

Bilderberg is fervently working to persuade the Irish to accept an even stronger Lisbon Treaty, which would create an even stronger European Union, creating a permanent (instead of rotating) chairman and a more powerful Parliament. The EU Parliament can even now impose laws on member states.

Irish voters rejected this EU expansion in an earlier referendum, but Bilderberg is pressing for another vote. Citizens of France and Germany overwhelmingly opposed the measure, numerous polls showed, but their heads of state signed off. Ireland requires a referendum before approval.

A meeting is planned June 18-19 in Brussels to cross t’s and dot i’s in an effort to induce Irish voters to reverse themselves and endorse the treaty. Under EU rules, all states must back a change for it to take effect. Bilderberg leaders plan a “private meeting” in advance of the formal session to push ratification.

“They’re going to make us vote until we vote their way,” said an Irishman protesting at the gates of Bilderberg, who feared reprisals if identified. There were a large number of European journalists fighting to expose Bilderberg and much is being published in Europe. Many were seized by police, surrounded by pointed guns and had their film and notes seized.

But The Times of London had a helpful story the opening day of the Bilderberg meeting, Thursday, May 14. “What we have been able to establish from a World Bank spokesman, Alexis O’Brien, that the organization’s president, Robert Zoellick, will be in Athens on unspecified business May 14,” the paper said. “And that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s public schedule is mysteriously empty for the next two days. Jo Ackermann, head of Deutsche Bank, will be traveling “somewhere in Europe.’

Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, will not be around until the end of the week.” (This was a moment when all journalists were striving to identify Bilderberg participants.)

“Jim Tucker, veteran stalker of the Bilderberg club meetings, claims that [Margaret] Thatcher was ordered “to dismantle British sovereignty, but she said ‘no way,’ so they had her sacked,” the paper said. (Events confirmed this, as did Lady Thatcher in a later conversation with Tucker.)

May 22 (Bloomberg) -- Two Illinois banks with combined assets of almost $1 billion were closed by regulators, pushing the toll of failed U.S. lenders to 36 this year amid the longest recession since the 1930s.

Strategic Capital Bank in Champaign and Citizens National Bank in Macomb were closed and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was named receiver of both, the FDIC said. Strategic Capital’s deposits were assumed by Midland States Bank of Effingham, Illinois, and deposits at Citizens National were purchased by Morton Community Bank.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Does Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi think the American people are stupid or is she just A LYING HYPOCRITE?

It is now all but obvious that Pelosi not only knew about the enhanced interrogation techniques being used by U.S. intelligence officials on terrorist detainees in the aftermath of 9-11...

..but Pelosi seemingly condoned the harsh interrogations as far back as 2002.

As first reported by The Washington Post back in December 2007, a group of lawmakers, including Pelosi, "was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk."

"Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding. ... no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said."

In the same Post article, one U.S. official present during the early briefings stated:

"[T]here was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, 'We don't care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.' "

Yet Pelosi -- who is now second in the Presidential line of succession -- continues to try to weasel her way out of public scrutiny as SHE PUTS POLITICS AHEAD OF OUR NATION'S SECURITY.

As she ramps up calls to investigate, prosecute and even jail Bush Justice Department officials and U.S. intelligence agents who were following orders and working to prevent another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, Pelosi has the audacity to look the American people in the eye and seemingly lie about what she knew and when she knew it.

Back in April of 2007, Pelosi accused then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales of lying and demanded his RESIGNATION.

"... Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has lost the trust of the American people. The nation cannot have a chief law enforcement officer whose candor and judgment are in serious question. The president should restore credibility to the office of the attorney general. Alberto Gonzales must resign."

Pelosi was right about what should happen when the American people lose trust in our nation's leaders. So to her statement, we would like to add the following:

By her actions, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has lost the trust of the American people. The nation cannot have a Speaker of the House -- a person who, by law, stands right behind the Vice-President in the presidential line of succession -- whose candor and judgment are in serious question. Credibility must be restored to the House of Representatives. Nancy Pelosi MUST RESIGN.

PELOSI SET THE STANDARD; SHE MUST NOW SET THE EXAMPLE AND LIVE UP TO IT.

She cannot credibly join extreme leftists in Congress and call for "investigations" and "hearings" into the aggressive interrogation techniques used against terrorist detainees and jeopardize our national security and potentially put the lives of innocent Americans at risk... now that it is known that she was FULLY BRIEFED and RAISED NO OBJECTIONS MORE THAN 7 YEARS AGO.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Uncle Sam wants to know where you live, not just the address, but the exact coordinates. Why would that be? Whatever their plans, our leaders believe it is worth $700 million dollars and hiring a city full of workers… 140,000 to be more precise. They are marching through our neighborhoods, taking readings at all our doors and asking if the house is a single or multi-family dwelling, all in the name of the census. This census that is a year away and has nothing to do with the job at hand.

The census bureau itself says, “The ability to capture Global Positioning System coordinates for most of the nation’s housing units will greatly reduce the number of geographic coding errors caused by using paper maps in previous counts.” This and other actions by this administration bring to mind the old saying, “there’s always two reasons for everything, the one we are told and the real reason.”

Douglas Gibbs writing in the American Daily Review says, “Imagine, if you will, that there are a number of people in a neighborhood that could not find the addresses they are tasked with finding. They are not locals, maybe are unable to read a map, or perhaps do not have the time to pull out a map, and they need to find you with specific GPS coordinates. Their devices would lead them to your front door with these coordinates. Imagine a crisis is afoot, and martial law is put into place. U.S. troops need to round up particular folks.”

“Let’s take this a step further. After all, with Barack Obama desiring to decrease the number of folks in the military, and with forces committed worldwide, we may not have sufficient military forces at home to deal with a rising national emergency. If the government decided to rely on foreign troops, perhaps United Nations personnel, most of which may not understand the street signs, much less know the lay of the land, they could use GPS devices to direct them to your front door.”

Sound alarming? It does to me. Although my thoughts run to the more mundane and immediate. Consider how cross referencing this information with a database of gun owners, confiscation would be much more efficient. Or perhaps the rounding up of pro-life activists, Christians or members of other groups Homeland Security tells us present a danger to the administration. On the other hand, it could be as simple as satellite surveillance.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

A top aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attended a CIA briefing in early 2003 in which it was made clear that waterboarding and other harsh techniques were being used in the interrogation of an alleged al-Qaeda operative, according to documents the CIA released to Congress on Thursday.

Pelosi has insisted that she was not directly briefed by Bush administration officials that the practice was being actively employed. But Michael Sheehy, a top Pelosi aide, was present for a classified briefing that included Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), then the ranking minority member of the House intelligence committee, at which agency officials discussed the use of waterboarding on terrorism suspect Abu Zubaida.

A Democratic source acknowledged yesterday that it is almost certain that Pelosi would have learned about the use of waterboarding from Sheehy. Pelosi herself acknowledged in a December 2007 statement that she was aware that Harman had learned of the waterboarding and had objected in a letter to the CIA's top counsel.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

THE PRESIDENT: ...I actually think that the tougher issue around medical care — it’s a related one — is what you do around things like end-of-life care —

Yes, where it’s $20,000 for an extra week of life.

THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. And I just recently went through this. I mean, I’ve told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip. It was determined that she might have had a mild stroke, which is what had precipitated the fall.

So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.

And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.

And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

So how do you — how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: ...you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

In other words, faceless bureaucrats in Washington -- not your family -- will decide whether your grandparents live or die.

While our health care system is certainly imperfect -- because all humans are imperfect, including doctors, nurses, hospitals and insurance companies -- they are more perfect, more competent, more informed, more capable than all of the bureaucrats to whom they'll be forced to report: a bureaucracy that will make all decisions about your health care.

Obama and the Statist Democrats promise health care for everyone, but they will not -- and they can't possibly -- deliver it.

And we know this, because this is what occurs in Canada and Britain and other centralized bureaucracies, where you simply can not have access to advanced health care, period.

And where will Barack Obama be in ten years, when the rest of us are struggling with a massive, out-of-control, federalized medical system that doesn't give a damn about individuals and is busy rationing care, denying care to the elderly?

He will be retired as a very young man; a very wealthy young man, who will have imposed his Marxist ideology upon this society and then walked away from it.

I used to be a Marxist, 30 years ago when I was in college. I studied Marxist Revolutionary tactics and strategy and history.Obama’s “Civilian Security Force”, “Just as Powerful as the Military”, is not some gentle civilian “Peace Corp”. They are forming the core of a Marxist “People’s Revolutionary Militia”.It works like this: when this or the next created “crisis” hits, and the mass of dumbed down sheeple is psychologically indoctrinated, Obama declares Martial Law and suspends the Constitution. When the rural areas erupt into armed opposition, Obama calls out the “People’s Militia” to put down the “Counter Revolutionaries”, that is, you and me. The core of his People’s Militia will be made up mostly of “inner city youth” who already are violent and alienated from American values. They will be given additional REAL military training, pumped up with fanatical hatred against us, “the oppressors”, weapons, and sent out to do battle with the “Counter Revolutionaries” desperately fighting in the rural areas. Let me tell you this: they won’t be following the Geneva Convention. The remaining “real” Americans, those of us who haven’t been brainwashed, will have to declare “Free American Zones” and then fight bloody guerrilla battles that will be awful. There will be atrocities, starvation, possibly foreign invasion as other powers attempt to pick at the dying American corpse.THAT is what Obama is planning for. They probably aren’t sure if it will be in a year or two or three or five…but…they are working toward it. These plans were all laid out in Bill Ayer’s living room years ago.Be prepared. Be strong. Do not yield.

Monday, May 4, 2009

Mommy blows up with toddler — this has got to be a new low for militant IslamPosted: April 28, 2009, 12:33 PM by Jonathan Kay

Having spent this morning catching up on my weekend reading, I came across this Page 4 article from Friday's New York Times. Here's the lead paragraph: "BAGHDAD — At least 80 people died and 120 others were injured Thursday in three bombings, one by a female suicide bomber in Baghdad who, Iraqi officials said, held a young child’s hand as she set off her explosives among a group of women and children receiving emergency food aid."

Even putting aside our baseline revulsion at terrorism, there are three especially hideous things that jump out from this:

1) A mother deliberately taking her (presumed) child with her as she immolates herself. For all the hundreds of suicide bombings that Iraq has already witnessed, this has got to be a first.

2) This was a line for food aid. Islamists have gone from attacking U.S. soldiers, to attacking Iraqi soldiers, to attacking police stations, to attacking the religious ceremonies of rival sects — on down the line of nihilism until, now, they are reduced to blowing up hungry people seeking sustenance.

3) This hideous crime was played on page four of The New York Times. And a quick scan of other media suggests it got similar B-rate treatment elsewhere. This sort of act would have been worth a worldwide banner headline a decade ago. But now, it's just another demented Islamist senselessly slaughtering fellow Muslims. With her kid. Yawn.